Novak Djokovic reached twenty-four Grand Slam singles titles at the 2023 US Open. The explanations offered at the time were mostly physical: the movement, the sliding, the recovery from defensive positions.
What the record actually rests on
Return games. Djokovic has led the tour in return-games-won for most of his career, and the gap is widest on second serve. A player who wins forty-five per cent of second-serve return points does not need to break often, because he converts pressure into breaks at the moments other players are protecting a lead.
The serve was never a weapon in the way Federer’s or Sampras’s was. It did not have to be. A player who holds at a normal rate and returns at an exceptional one wins the same number of matches as a player who does the reverse, and loses fewer of them in five sets.
The part that is not measurable
He also played the longest peak of the three, which is partly training and diet and partly the ordinary luck of avoiding a career-altering injury. Records at this level are always a compound of a skill and a run of good fortune. It is usually the skill that gets discussed.
